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Reality presents to us in multiple forms, as a multiple level pyramid. Physics is the foundation, and should be made as solid and complete as possible. Suppose we will find the unified theory of the fundamental physical laws. Then what? Will we be able to deduce the higher levels, or they have their own life, not completely depending on the foundations? At the higher levels arise goals, life, and even consciousness, which seem to be more than mere constructs of the fundamental constituents. Are all these high level structures completely reducible to the basis, or by contrary, they also affect the lower levels? Are mathematics and logic enough to solve these puzzles? Are there questions objective science can't even define rigorously? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the world made of?

Thank you for the welcome! I am glad to see your essay here, and I look forward to read it!

Best wishes,

Cristi

Stefan Weckbach wrote on Mar. 4, 2017 @ 07:38 GMT

Dear Cristinel Stoica,

the content and the writing style of your essay are very appealing to me. You present the problems in a very understandable language, show pros and cons and come to a conclusion. You take into account many of the relevant fields of investigation and many aspects of reality. And you have a well balanced judgement about different / possible answers to the questions...

the content and the writing style of your essay are very appealing to me. You present the problems in a very understandable language, show pros and cons and come to a conclusion. You take into account many of the relevant fields of investigation and many aspects of reality. And you have a well balanced judgement about different / possible answers to the questions posed in your essay. I think you try to tackle these problems as objectively as possible, what especially means to not forget the subjectivity of the agents who undertakes these considerations. I will mark your essay therefore with a very high score.

Allow me to make some annotations to your essay. The question "why is there something rather than nothing?" can be answered in an alternative way. You answered it by a necessity-argument: Maths is necessarily as it is - eternally. I would add a possibility-argument: there cannot be 'nothing' in the radical sense, because this nothing obviously has the potential to produce something. So 'nothing' is a misnomer, it has at least one feature and therefore it can't really exist as something that has no properties.

If we find the complete set of physical laws, these laws would not tell us how they came about or have been selected. They would just build up a consistent overall explanatory scheme where these laws can be thought of as being necessary *from the perspective within the system*, because these laws would heavily relate to each other. Even if mathematics would be the bottom layer of ultimate reality, i doubt that mathematics would be able to explain why this set of mathematical laws should be reserved to correlate with some physical stuff, or stated more precisely, be that physical stuff. Tegmark does explain it the way that all mathematical structures which have some delicate properties *are* indeed physical stuff. This exludes i think a part of mathematics which hasn't these properties, otherwise all inconsistent or contradictory axiomatic systems do also exist as physical stuff. Or think of all infinite series: Does there exist a kind of Hilbert-hotel physically somewhere (as a universe or some other physical instantiation)? I think the MUH demands a certain kind of filtering and for this filtering i know no mathematical law that should govern it (please see my remark on the implications of Gödels theorems in my own essay). So the question for the MUH to be necessarily true seems to remain somewhat subjective to me, because there doesn't exist a metalaw (other than by human definitions) which could decide what mathematical structures are physical by necessity. Why not include all inconsistent mathematical descriptions and let there be an inconsistent (chaotic) universe (or infinitely many of them)? And if so, how can we know that, at the end of the day, we don't live in exactly such a universe (with some delicately hard to detect inconsistencies)? Or even worse: maybe the measurement problem is an indication that we indeed live in such a universe? Maybe the multitude of different interpretations of QM is a hint that we live in a system which is inconsistent at some point and therefore can prove everything, especially all the different kinds of QM interpretations to be somewhat all equally sound and all seem to be equally rational? Surely, if one takes the MUH serious and takes the quest for ultimate reality serious, one should demand consistency as a main property. But does reality necessarily follow this demand? I would strongly answer with yes, but there are enough people out there who would say no, reality is absurd and irrational. Similar to assume ultimate reality to be strictly deterministic and therefore at odds with human experience, these people would argue that existence per se is irrational - and therefore could well be considered as inconsistent (inconsistency therefore would be just another word for them to say that existence is irrational).

So, the MUH demands a kind of filtering of mathematical structures and i see no metalaw which could dictate this filtering. A natural metalaw should be 'consistency', but *how natural* is this in the light of the existence and the possibility of the existence of 'inconsistencies'? Is this demand of consistency only a fluke due to the accident that our universe *seems* to be overall consistent? I would again answer no, but how to prove it? I think the only way out here is to assume that mathematics - and logic - itself are not necessarily eternal facts, but brilliant *ideas* of a higher state of consciousness i would call God. We only think that these ideas are eternal (and in a certain sense they indeed must be - because God itself is eternal and operates beyond space and time), but they could turn out to be only some tiny aspects of such an eternal God. Surely, whether maths and logics are 'temporal' ideas or eternal aspects of such a God depends on how eternity is structured and whether there is a kind of other-dimensional time within it or not. Who knows.

> "Even if mathematics would be the bottom layer of ultimate reality, i doubt that mathematics would be able to explain why this set of mathematical laws should be reserved to correlate with some physical stuff, or stated more precisely, be that physical stuff."

> "Even if mathematics would be the bottom layer of ultimate reality, i doubt that mathematics would be able to explain why this set of mathematical laws should be reserved to correlate with some physical stuff, or stated more precisely, be that physical stuff."

It is true that there is no known reason why a particular mathematical structure corresponds to our universe. Tegmark tries a sort of anthropic reasoning, which I explain why I didn't find convincing here.

About MUH, I avocate a similar position as Tegmark, but with less restrictions. I would include any mathematical structure.

> "Why not include all inconsistent mathematical descriptions and let there be an inconsistent (chaotic) universe (or infinitely many of them)?".

In my previous essays The Tao of It and Bit and And the math will set you free I advocate to include only a simple contradiction, and use it to derive all possibilities out of it. I add a condition of logical consistency to select the consistent universes. For some reason, I think that one should try first to find a mathematical structure, hence consistent description, for our universe. If it will turn out that only an inconsistent description can work, then that would be strange, and would include all other possibilities, including the consistent ones, into an all-inconsistent mix.

> "there are enough people out there who would say no, reality is absurd and irrational"

It clearly appears irrational to us, at least for the moment. In fact, I think we are irrational as a species. We are easily fooled by visual illusions and cognitive biases. But even if we would be perfect, it may take us long time to fully make sense of the universe. But I wouldn't blame the universe for irrationality yet, given that our brains are not so optimized to rationality as we would like to think.

I think the only chance we have to make sense of the universe is if it is consistent. It is a bit like Dr. Gregory House choosing the only diagnostics that is curable, and apply that treatment, and ignore the other possibilities with the same symptoms, because they can't be cured. We choose consistency because it is the only hope to understand the laws and the metalaws.

Your paper is interesting. It reminds me of an idea I had years ago of their being this levels or a hierarchy of being. I also thought is had some basis with the Godel-Turing thesis. I am not quite so concerned with these questions any more. It is not clear to me how something like Tegmarks mathematical universe hypothesis can ever be tested.

I do delve into issues of Godel's theorem in my essay. I used this essay contest as a way of displaying something I had worked on. This does involve spacetime singularities, but as you see the singularity is physically a monodromy more than anything. I remember you were quite concerned about showing that spacetime singularities do not exist as such.

Anyway, good job here. Your paper is better than most. I will score this to raise it out of the doldrums.

Thank you for your comment. I look forward to read your essay, I think it contains some stuff that I am interested in.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Lawrence B. Crowell replied on Mar. 7, 2017 @ 19:08 GMT

I am pleased that you liked it. I know that you have worked to dethrone spacetime singularities. Of course in my essay they are really physically relevant of monodromies, which have topological consequences. This is in some ways a part of a program I have for understanding how we might renormalize quantum gravity.

You said "I know that you have worked to dethrone spacetime singularities."

Yes, I worked a lot in spacetime singularities in (classical) general relativity, but not to dethrone them. I actually love them and wanted to understand them. They exist (if no quantum or other kind of effect doesn't remove them), but I provided a description of them which is free of infinities, while still making geometrical and physical sense. They are still singular, and I think this may be useful, because they have dimensional reduction effects which may be useful in quantum gravity.

Bet regards,

Cristi

Wilhelmus de Wilde de Wilde wrote on Mar. 6, 2017 @ 18:12 GMT

Dear Christi;

Good to meet again here and thank you for a very understandable and informing piece of work, I have read it with great pleasure.

You say : "The universe knows how to build atoms", if atoms a constructions of an architect, this why you mention perhaps that "Because of our limitations (compared to the architect), it is possible that some phenomena are not comprehensible to us".

Of course he title architect is aiming at a power outside of ourselves, in my perception I argue that this is not a "power" or "personality" but a timeless and spaceless Hilbert space that I call Total Simultaneity.

I very agree with you that "The tablet of the metalaw includes emergence, metatheorems, the relative interdependence and independence of various levels of reality"

Thank you for your feedback. I didn't have in mind an architect when I wrote that "The universe knows how to build atoms", rather that the universe behaves like doing difficult calculations, which we are unable to do. And if we want to say the universe has a purpose, then the purpose seems to be that of behaving according to its own physical laws. If we want to see this as something like a primitive form of information processing or even thinking, this is also what builds us. Maybe there are no fundamental differences, even if you look at it as physical law or following a goal in a primitive way. I think what you said about the spaceless and timeless Hilbert space captures something very interesting, and I look forward to read your essay.

I am glad to meet you again at this contest, and that you liked my essay. I plan to read your essay as soon as possible, it seems very appealing judging by the title and abstract.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Natesh Ganesh wrote on Mar. 7, 2017 @ 06:22 GMT

Dear Cristinel,

Thanks for a very nice essay. It was enjoyable to read and understand. I was hoping to clarify a few things.

"Science is by definition objective – all definitions and inferences are objective, and the experiments have to be reproducible by anyone who follows the specifications. All easy problems of consciousness fall within the objective nature of science. But the very notion of subjective experience seems to escape any objective definition."

I was curious if you have come across John Searle talking about the fallacy of ambiguity and what you think about it. He contends that it is possible to have an epistemically objective science of something that is ontologically subjective, like conscious experience. Here is a youtube link to a talk he gave at google discussing these ideas in greater detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg&t=1393s

"Maybe subjective experience emerges from the organization of matter, or as a property of information, like integration. Then, since matter is always structured and always processes information, we arrive at a kind of panpsychism reducible to the structure and information of matter."

Do you think it is possible to avoid this type of panpsychism, if there is good reason that constrains the type of matter organization and external conditions, under which the matter might have a subjective experience.

I didn't come across John Searle talking about the fallacy of ambiguity. I just started watching the video you sent me and I watched so far 30', and I like the idea of having an epistemically objective science of something that is ontologically subjective. It definitely is something to think about, thank yopu for sending me the link. Regarding the question about panpsychism, I think that if there is a way to see what is the level where subjective experience emerges, we may be able to decide it. I am not sure if this would be possible. I will read your essay, I feel there may be some connections.

Best regards,

Cristi

Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Mar. 7, 2017 @ 16:48 GMT

Dear Natesh,

I finished watching John Searles' video. I like it, and there are many points in which I agree with him. I hoped that I can cast my arguments for a subjective science in terms of Searles' epistemically objective science of ontologically subjective things like consciousness, but I think it doesn't improve them. His idea of epistemic/ontological subjective/objective fit well with his view that what is something special about subjective experience is reducible to the biology (idea which I don't think is enough to explain subjective experience).

Best regards,

Cristi

Steve Dufourny wrote on Mar. 7, 2017 @ 09:37 GMT

Hi Christi ,

Happy also to see you again on FQXI.

I liked also your papper like the papper of Don Limuti.The free will and this determinism.How can we rank the importance of informations.How to consider this determinism and antideterminism and the encodings.It is about the reductionism also and the roads towards our singumlarities after all.Hilbert indeed was very relevant and Nother also.The works of Mr Van Leunen are interesting also.The AI could appear with determinism.

I am glad you liked the essay. I am looking forward to read your essay, which I think is interesting judging by the title and the provocative abstract.

Best wishes,

Cristi

James Arnold wrote on Mar. 7, 2017 @ 18:49 GMT

Hello Cristi

Your essay reveals an open and inquisitive mind, which is most enjoyable to read.

To the question about “nothing” I don’t think you go far enough. Any sort of universe is a "something." Vacuum fluctuations, the string landscape, etc., are all something. Nothing = no universe. No universe = no mathematics.

I believe you were on track when considering how profound subjectivity is than with “we are just substructures of ... a mathematical structure.”

You may be interested in my essay "Quantum spontaneity and the development of consciousness" where I try to validate our subjective experience without reducing it to matter or mathematics, or vice versa.

> Any sort of universe is a "something." Vacuum fluctuations, the string landscape, etc., are all something.

This is exactly what I said.

> Nothing = no universe. No universe = no mathematics.

I take it that you refer to mathematics as a tool discovered/invented by humans. To see what I understand by mathematical structure, you can read my previous essay, and then read again my argument about something rather than nothing, and see if your syllogism still holds. In that essay I explained in more detail the logic behind the omnipresence of mathematical structures. This also answers the part related to mathematics from your other two comments. Of course, even then, you don't have to agree with me.

> where I try to validate our subjective experience without reducing it to matter or mathematics, or vice versa

To me, matter is nothing like classical physics matter, mathematical structures are nothing like a set of axioms and proof that fit in a human brain, and I don't think I try to reduce subjective experience to these or vice-versa. I compare different possible positions, including that there is only one stuff which is all three at the same time. I am satisfied without knowing the answers to unanswerable questions and without reducing things that we don't understand to other things that we also don't understand :)

Best regards,

Cristi

Robin Berjon wrote on Mar. 7, 2017 @ 21:32 GMT

Hi Cristi,

I very much enjoyed your essay, and I have a couple of questions.

The first is that you mention free will as being possibly "compatible with the determinism of the Schrödinger equation". This is an issue that I wish I had touched on more than the short paragraph it got in my essay, so I can't resist expanding a little bit here. Simply: I wonder if looking at free will in...

The first is that you mention free will as being possibly "compatible with the determinism of the Schrödinger equation". This is an issue that I wish I had touched on more than the short paragraph it got in my essay, so I can't resist expanding a little bit here. Simply: I wonder if looking at free will in terms of determinism isn't by necessity an impasse, but if (as you seem to be leading towards as well) it would not be more fruitful to define it in terms of the specific nature of the determinism that is involved.

If we accept that individuality can be characterised by information-theoretic relations (that make it possible to establish a clear but porous boundary between an organism and its environment), then an array of measurements for different aspects of this individualised organism's relationship with its environment becomes available. This provides a framework within which to define how and to what degree an organism's behaviour is controlled by its environment. Autonomy, openness, etc. could then lead to a satisfying description of free will.

I wonder how you would see this view as relating to yours on this topic?

The other is the classic question you bring up of "What breathes fire into the equations?" I wonder — and this is way more speculative even than the previous part — if mathematics doesn't admit a lower level of description that is entirely processual/functional, and that the static, timeless relations we have extracted above that are not "simply" special cases that happen to lend themselves to such static-oriented analysis. Notably I have been wondering how many paradoxes vanish if mathematical statements are taken to be transformative operations in which the output cannot conflict with the input since the world has changed by that very operation (eg. the barber shaves those who did not shave themselves in the current time step — in the next step they will have shaved themselves and therefore will not do so again, etc.). In other words, the fire has always been there, we just took it out.

Admittedly this notion is barely in its infancy and might require just a little bit more work ;-)

As you know, there is a position that tries to reconcile free-will with determinism, called compatibilism, which perhaps is just what you refer to by "it would not be more fruitful to define it in terms of the specific nature of the determinism that is involved". The position that I mentioned in the essay is...

As you know, there is a position that tries to reconcile free-will with determinism, called compatibilism, which perhaps is just what you refer to by "it would not be more fruitful to define it in terms of the specific nature of the determinism that is involved". The position that I mentioned in the essay is different. Schrodinger's equation is a fundamental law governing the wavefunction, and its success in describing the behavior of particles and atoms is overwhelming. But to reconcile it with the definite outcomes of measurements, it is supposed than the wavefunction should collapse. This leads to some problems: it breaks a fundamental law like Schrodinger's equation, it violates the conservation laws, and escapes a causal description. My proposal is to resolve the tension between clasical macro and quantum micro (also at the origin of the measurement problem) by selecting from the Hilbert space only the solutions that work like this. But this leads to moving the collapse on the initial conditions of the universe, in an apparent retrocausality. The solutions are then still deterministic according to the Schrodinger equation, without collapse, but the probabilities are moved to the initial conditions. So we have both determinism and randomness. I argued that this provides a compatibility between determinism and free-will, although I leave it here, since I am not sure what free-will really is. Of course, even the input from QM is too small to be able to account for what we feel free-will is, so in all cases one should add to the description what you said, "Autonomy, openness, etc.".

About your question about a lower level description of mathematics. I think any sort of description of any sort of thing, if it is consistent and rigorous, it becomes mathematical. I agree that we can conceive worlds in which the propositions change from being true to being false and vice-versa, but this happens by change, as in the example you provided, and maybe this is time. So if I understand it well, I think this is still a dynamical system. But who knows, I may be surprised someday by learning about something more fundamental than mathematics. If you advance with the idea, please let me know!

I found your essay very thought provoking. I like your open-mindedness, posing more questions than you provide answers to: "I am satisfied without knowing the answers to unanswerable questions and without reducing things that we don't understand to other things that we also don't understand." I also appreciate your point that mathematics as a tool may leave us short of a unified explanation of reality: "The lowest level of the pyramid of physics seems to be imperfectly rooted in the ground of mathematics" - and your use of the Hawking quote along similar lines.

The view, a la Tegmark, that mathematics can describe all would seem to lead us astray from the fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing. I say this because I think that the question is better posed as "why do we have THIS universe rather than nothing", and this universe has a set of laws which seem to be finely tuned to complexity. As the Hawking quote points out, why the universe would be inclined to create complexity is likely a question beyond maths. In my essay "From nothingness to value ethics" I try to explain why this tendency should be a fundamental consequence of existence from nothing - to create not only a when and a where, but also a WHAT. I would be interested in your opinion of this.

Thank you for reading my essay and providing interesting comments and questions.

I agree with you that "why do we have THIS universe rather than nothing" is indeed a better question. But maybe if we break it into smaller questions, we increase or chances to advance. The smaller questions may be (1) "why do we have THIS universe rather than something else" and (2) "why do we have something rather than nothing". Then, what I did was to break (2) into (2') "what can't not exist?" and (2'') "what else do we need for what can't not exist to make up a world?". I think that the answer to (2') is "mathematical structures". MUH states that the answer to (2'') is "this is enough", but not everyone is satisfied. Also, Tegmark can be understood as proposing to reformulate (1) as (1') "why is this particular mathematical structure our universe rather than any other structure", and to addressing it by anthropic reasoning. I think the latter part is subject to some critical remarks based on computational equivalence which I described in And the math will set you free.

You made me curious about your essay "From nothingness to value ethics", and I am looking forward to read it.

Best regards,

Cristi

James Lee Hoover wrote on Mar. 8, 2017 @ 06:02 GMT

Christinel,

The tablet of the law is the theory of everything, something you suggest is fundamentally simple, but your tablet of metalaw sounds like metalegal principles applying to all intelligent creatures of the universe, relating to Kant's Categorical Imperative based on natural law theory. Critics say it depends on subjective or relative concepts of good and bad. Does that relate to your tablet of metalaw?

My essay surveys the zoom-dependent nature of the universe and entropy as an independent law of nature, citing the Jeremy England flavor. I find the issue we are exploring somewhat difficult to scrutinize.

Thank you for the comments. Yes, the table of the law contains the fundamental laws. In the essay I try to not use the words "theory of everything" about this, since it would be about the fundamental laws only. It is not evident at all that the higher level of organizations can be reduced to the fundamental laws, and I gave several reasons about this. Of course the table of the law underlies them, but there are limits of computability, logical completeness (by finite length proof) etc. In addition, the higher level may do stuff that is not visible in the low level ones, and may even constrain them (as I argue it happens in quantum mechanics). The table of the metalaw include no-go theorems, emergent laws that are independent on the fundamental ones, like entropy for instance, etc. I did not discuss ethics, but I think it should be connected to the metalaw too. I agree, these are all difficult, some problems may be impossible to even define.

Best regards,

Cristi

James Lee Hoover replied on Mar. 9, 2017 @ 18:04 GMT

Christinel,

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" A good question.

Is so-called empty space the cusp of reality, alternatively something then nothing?

> Is so-called empty space the cusp of reality, alternatively something then nothing?

No, I didn't say this.

> How do you make this physics foundation solid ? of the pyramid?

I am not sure what you mean. If you refer to the universe as a mathematical structure, maybe consistency is enough. I am not sure what is "solid", since there is no such thing in reality. Solid objects only appear to be so. Or "solid" as a thing that can't be destroyed? What can destroy a mathematical structure? Or perhaps I am missing what you mean.

Best regards,

Cristi

Vladimir Rodin wrote on Mar. 8, 2017 @ 12:45 GMT

Dear Cristinel Stoica,

I highly appreciate and completely support thoughts and the approach, stated in your essay. It’s magnificent and very topical material. I hope that you will find concrete attempts of transition to the following level of physical laws in my work.

Thank you for the comments, and I am interested to see your attempts of transition to the following level of physical laws.

Best regards,

Cristi

William L Stubbs wrote on Mar. 8, 2017 @ 18:30 GMT

Cristi Stoica,

You wrote a very interesting essay that touches on a number of thought provoking points and questions. However, I do not see where you addressed the supposed theme of the essay, ‘How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?’ Can you summarize in a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs how your essay addresses this theme?

There are several ideas discussed that certainly seem to relate to the theme, but I do not see where you pulled them all together to respond to the question posed by the theme. Now, that does not mean that you did not do this, it may just be beyond me. But, I felt that I pretty much understood most of what you discussed, and, in the end, just did not come away with a good feel for your position on the matter.

Obviously, based on the posts and ratings, others are more in tuned with your approach, which further points to my probable lacking. You can tell from my essay that I approached the theme in a more rudimentary way. I attempted to lay out how the evolution from subatomic particles, that are at the will of physics, to a living cell, that has a will of its own, might have occurred. Still, I want to know your point; so please bear with me. Thanks.

You said "I do not see where you addressed the supposed theme of the essay, ‘How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?’ Can you summarize in a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs how your essay addresses this theme?".

To answer this, please allow me to point you to section 8 for goals, 9,11 for consciousness, to section 12 for a conclusion, and to sections 1-7,10 for the mindless mathematical laws, on which I build the other sections, and which contain elements that I used there. I gave more attention to principles than to specific models of goals and agents for the following reasons: (1) agents with goals are pretty much understood in older results that I mention in section 8. By contrast, (2) I think that consciousness is very little understood, and I personally am not satisfied with the current models, and also I don't have a better one. I think this is due to the lack of understanding of fundamental principles, which I divide into "laws" and "metalaws". I think for the theme of the contest metalaws are most relevant, but at the same time, since fundamental science works by reductionism, I had to show the relations between laws and metalaws, and the strengths and limits of reductionism. To the perspective I intended to present with respect to the theme, I think this was the best approach. There is a long way to answer properly these questions, and without knowing what physical laws allow us to do, I think that there is little hope to answer them.

You said you "did not come away with a good feel for your position on the matter", which means that I don't rush to conclusions, which I consider would be premature.

You said "based on the posts and ratings, others are more in tuned with your approach, which further points to my probable lacking". I think that the comments I receive are self-explanatory of what others saw in my essay, good or bad, and the ones that gave very small ratings probably didn't comment, so perhaps it's impossible to learn from their feedback.

I invite you and every physicist to read my work “TIME ORIGIN,DEFINITION AND EMPIRICAL MEANING FOR PHYSICISTS, Héctor Daniel Gianni ,I’m not a physicist.

How people interested in “Time” could feel about related things to the subject.

1) Intellectuals interested in Time issues usually have a nice and creative wander for the unknown.

2) They usually enjoy this wander of their searches around it.

3) For millenniums this wander has been shared by a lot of creative people around the world.

4) What if suddenly, something considered quasi impossible to be found or discovered such as “Time” definition and experimental meaning confronts them?

5) Their reaction would be like, something unbelievable,… a kind of disappointment, probably interpreted as a loss of wander…..

6) ….worst than that, if we say that what was found or discovered wasn’t a viable theory, but a proved fact.

7) Then it would become offensive to be part of the millenary problem solution, instead of being a reason for happiness and satisfaction.

8) The reader approach to the news would be paradoxically adverse.

9) Instead, I think it should be a nice welcome to discovery, to be received with opened arms and considered to be read with full attention.

11)Time “existence” is exclusive as a “measuring system”, its physical existence can’t be proved by science, as the “time system” is. Experimentally “time” is “movement”, we can prove that, showing that with clocks we measure “constant and uniform” movement and not “the so called Time”.

12)The original “time manuscript” has 23 pages, my manuscript in this contest has only 9 pages.

I share this brief with people interested in “time” and with physicists who have been in sore need of this issue for the last 50 or 60 years.

I send you my congrats not only for this new, intriguing Essay, but also for your recent remarkable results in general relativity, particle physics and quantum mechanics.

Concerning your Essay, you wrote "Suppose we will find the unified theory of the fundamental physical laws. Then what?". This is a fundamental question. Your statement that "if the wave-function is real rather than mere probability, causality as we know it has to be reconsidered" is intriguing and opens various doors. Finally you wrote: "A bottom-up approach may never lead to the understanding of the higher levels, and a top-down approach is not enough." This shows how small we are with respect to the gigantic Nature.

Your Essay is a remarkable contribution which deserves the highest score that I am going to give you. Good luck in the Contest.

Thank you for your kind comments, I am very honored. I hope this essay contest will catalyse the rigorous research of the connections between the fundamental laws and the emergent systems. While I too dedicate most of my time to researching the fundamental law, in this essay I wanted to emphasize the necessity to also consider the metalaws. I wish you good luck with the contest!

Cheers,

Cristi

Joe Fisher replied on Mar. 10, 2017 @ 16:48 GMT

Dear Cristinel Stoica,

Please excuse me for I have no intention of disparaging in any way any part of your essay.

I merely wish to point out that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) Physicist & Nobel Laureate.

Only nature could produce a reality so simple, a single cell amoeba could deal with it.

The real Universe must consist only of one unified visible infinite physical surface occurring in one infinite dimension, that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light.

A more detailed explanation of natural reality can be found in my essay, SCORE ONE FOR SIMPLICITY. I do hope that you will read my essay and perhaps comment on its merit.

I could not agree more with the quote from Einstein, and with your remarks on simplicity. I am a modest seeker of simplicity myself, and I hope that the laws of the universe fit on a small tablet. Maybe some are more blessed with the ability to see the simplicity without simplifying too much, and others are more involved or sometimes lost in complexity. As a realist, you definitely know that the same simple unique reality includes all kinds. I added your essay to my planned readings. Good luck with the contest!

Best regards,

Cristi

Stefan Keppeler wrote on Mar. 10, 2017 @ 23:15 GMT

Dear Cristi,

that was interesting to read. I have some praise and some criticism -- and maybe a funny final observation! But let's begin from the start. I like the early sections of your essay, in particular |5> Floating levels of the pyramid -- I fervently support your conclusions in that section.

I also agree with what you say about quantum field theory in |6>, but I fear we wouldn't easily reach consensus on several things you say about quantum mechanics in |6> and |7> (e.g. the non-locality implied by the violation of Bell's inequalities isn't at variance with causality and there are interpretations of quantum mechanics which avoid the problems caused by the collapse in the Copenhagen interpretation).

You lose me somewhat in |8> and |9>. In sections |10> and |11> you develop some special version of Platonism, with which one may or may not want to agree.

Interestingly, however, I essentially agree again with your section |12>. Given that there were a couple of points in between, which I'd challenge, this might be surprising. Looking once more at it, I think you could have almost jumped straight from |5> to |12>! I'd be curious about your views on my essay, which, I think, partially parallels those parts of your essay leading me to similar conclusions.

I very much appreciate your comments, including your criticism. My comments about Bell's and especially KS theorems vs. (what we used to know as) causality refers only to realistic interpretations. In particular, in KS, a realistic state has to know in advance the measurement. I don't see this as a problem, since I advocate a realistic interpretation based only on the Schrodinger equation, without collapse. But I proved here that if the measurement takes place without collapse, the initial conditions have to be special. And KS shows that whatever variables you add, hidden or not, this can't be avoided. I think that in all directions we go, we have to give up what causality used to be (past elements of reality influencing/determining future elements of reality but not vice-versa). "In sections |10> and |11> you develop some special version of Platonism, with which one may or may not want to agree." I completely agree to disagree with parts of what I wrote, in particular with these ones. I used the opportunity of this essay contest to include along with things on which science agrees also discussions of some speculative proposals, and even to propose some. I hoped I made it clear enough whenever I wrote about such things that they are possibilities rather than established truths on which we can objectively agree, possibilities which I found interesting and definitory for some underlying philosophies of nature. Thanks for the careful analysis and insightful comments, and even if we don't agree on of my entire essay, I find your remarks very useful. I am looking forward to read your essay!

Cheers,

Cristi

Georgina Woodward wrote on Mar. 11, 2017 @ 01:22 GMT

Hi Christinel,

“If sentience is either reducible or related to physical structure and information, then one should expect it to be present in primitive forms at each level of reality, since structure and information are also present there.“ C. Stoica, 2017

Sentience can be related to physical structure and information without being present in the lower levels constituents. It...

“If sentience is either reducible or related to physical structure and information, then one should expect it to be present in primitive forms at each level of reality, since structure and information are also present there.“ C. Stoica, 2017

Sentience can be related to physical structure and information without being present in the lower levels constituents. It is important to avoid the fallacy of division. Regarding sentience, there either is sufficient complexity and organization for its emergence or there isn’t. Beyond sentience there either is sufficient structural organization of neural architecture for goals and planning or there isn’t; In my opinion. For analogy: An Aran design scarf with twisted knitted cables running its length emerges over time from some specific sequences of forces applied to a length of the spun yarn; giving the accumulated complex spatial distribution of the wool. It would be incorrect to say that, as the scarf shows the Aran cable design so must the wool yarn itself, the wool fibers making up the spun yarn and even the atoms of the wool. There are no Aran design atoms or Aran design wool fibers, or Aran design unknitted yarn. The emergent characteristic exists because of the level of complexity and organization. Though dependent on the structure and characteristics of the constituents at smaller scales the emergent characteristic is not due just to there being more. Thus, lesser amounts do not show a lesser amount of the characteristic, they do not have the emergent characteristic.

“Photons and electrons are associated to information processing, and we can say that their goal is to propagate according to the physical laws. This goal is always to propagate an infinitesimal step, and it is always attained in an infinitesimal time, in accord to the equations of motion.?” C. Stoica, 2017

“We can say that their goal is… but is it? A goal is an anticipated future outcome not merely action Now caused by the physics /chemistry of the situation. Inanimate objects do not have the capacity to possess goals of their own. Assigning prior purposes and goals rather than just looking at the causes is unnecessary and in my opinion inaccurate.

I enjoyed very much reading your comments, and I am happy to see in them your keen eye for identifying the most critical parts of an argument. And if I was reading only the fragments you quoted I would most likely agree with you. In them I tried to summarize things I wrote earlier in the essay, in which in turn I tried to summarize some of my thoughts about this. You rightfully say that there are things that emerge at higher level which are not visible in lower levels (and the first half of my essay is just about this). So I think the meaning of what I mean is neither reducible nor included in the parts you quoted, it is just summarized, and perhaps I could summarize them better. If I didn't succeed, is my complete fault, I should not try to fit to much into a short essay. I plan to write what I meant in a more detailed form, in which to consider your counterarguments and others that I have myself. Maybe the conclusion I will reach will be different from this and other possibilities I mentioned in the essay. Nevertheless, it would be helpful to appeal to your keen eye after I'll finish it, so if you will still be interested I will send it to you (and also if you are not sure already it's a dead end). Thanks for your comments, and good luck with the essay, which I am looking forward to read!

Best wishes,

Cristi

Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Mar. 11, 2017 @ 08:55 GMT

Dear Georgina,

The main thing I had in mind when writing that part of the essay was to attempt to strip consciousness from what are "easy problems", to see what ultimately remains, if remains anything. I tried to explain briefly both possibilities: it remains nothing, or what remains is some primitive, bare, essence of subjective experience and goals. In the former possibility, only the form, the patterns to use your example, are relevant for this level. In the latter possibility, it should be something irreducible that remains. And I asked what would be the level where these appear, in both options, and I think the level is much lower than we expect in both cases. I try not to be committed to any of the possibilities, since I think that objective science can only describe functionality, the "as if", while our subjective experience seems to tell us that there is something irreducible beyond the "as if". For this reason I suggested to use a sort of subjective science. If there is a chance that subjective science can add something on top of the objective science, something irreducible, I can't prove objectively, and I not only stated that it is impossible to prove, but perhaps impossible to even formulate the question in an objectively rigorous way. I will see where this will lead me, but I think it is essential in both cases to strip to the bare bones as much as possible the definitions and questions about consciousness, and to go as deep as possible.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Georgina Woodward replied on Mar. 13, 2017 @ 09:49 GMT

Hi Christinel,

I appreciate your replies and explanation of the thinking behind your writing. I understand, from my own experience, how hard it is to say precisely what one wants within a strict character count. My comments were meant as constructive criticism of just those specific parts. I'd be happy to read more of your writing. Kind regards Georgina

Thank you for the comments and the good question! I was oscillating between a pyramid and a tower, and perhaps the better choice is a tower. A pyramid has to end somewhere (maybe a final "purpose"?), but a tower can go on forever, so maybe this is better. However, it came handier to me to make it pyramid, and didn't give much thought of what may this convey, maybe I chose it like this because it is more stable. Good question!

Best regards,

Cristi

Rajiv K Singh wrote on Mar. 11, 2017 @ 14:47 GMT

Dear Ms Stoica,

"The highest levels appear from the lowest level by ignoring details, resulting in a coarse graining of the state space." You identify it is as a process of abstraction. In a long time, I find a person that agrees on this. Thank you. Yet, its potential is far greater.

You take this example to defend the emergence of indeterministic statistical laws from deterministic...

"The highest levels appear from the lowest level by ignoring details, resulting in a coarse graining of the state space." You identify it is as a process of abstraction. In a long time, I find a person that agrees on this. Thank you. Yet, its potential is far greater.

You take this example to defend the emergence of indeterministic statistical laws from deterministic processes at the most fundamental level. I cannot agree with this entirely. By asking to ignore the details at the lower level, what you allow is that many microscopic states map to one macrostate, and at macroscopic level, there is a many to one mapping. At the microscopic level though, evolution proceeds as one to one mapping between cause and effect, which in turn causes unique thread of macroscopic evolution, regardless of what it may appear at coarser level of macroscopic details. In fact, even if we consider many to one mapping at microscopic level, still we do not escape the unique trajectory in phase space. That is, the past of the universe may have many descriptions, but the future is unique since you do not allow one to many mapping. This logic could be applied to the earliest possible epoch, and then we could say that one is tracing a single thread of outcomes making the universe entirely deterministic. Therefore, indeterminism may arise only if at the fundamental level also many to one, and one to many mapping occur in the state space. Otherwise, statistical significance would vanish with sufficiently powerful computing technology.

In sections |9> to |11>, you have touched upon so many ideas and notions that overlap with elements of my own, that if I try to discuss and compare them all, it would be as much as the essay itself. Yet, let me take a few.

All of our thoughts have informational basis, all descriptions are informative, all communications are exchange of information. And here I do not mean quantity of information (as per Shannon), but the semantics (meaning) of information. All information is relational. Does information have a reality of its own? Information does not have to be digital or discrete at all. Due to our ability to draw inferences from observation of states of matter we tend to accept that association of information with states results from an act of modeling, without realizing that unless the system like brain has the ability to store, process, and transmit information by natural means, no information may ever come to reality. Therefore, either information has a reality of its own in the function of the universe, or it can never come about. In fact, if we associate information with states of matter, then the states must naturally bear correlation with that information. Moreover, with each interaction then information processing takes place.

Panpsyschism does not have to be right. Goals / aims are abstract information of expressions of 'need or want' that can emerge from specific structured information processing in a reproducing systems, as I have attempted to work out in my essay. That is, goal is not fundamental, information is.

"Is this impossibility to give an objective definition of subjectivity a proof that the hard `problem doesn’t exist? ... A subjective science can’t be objective ..."

Hard problem may dissolve if we find objective process of building abstraction. The process of abstraction that you mentioned is the potent mechanism to give rise to irreducible symbolism -- you may refer to my submission. Yes, you are right in saying, "Maybe subjective experience emerges from the organization of matter, or as a property of information.", It is not as much as the organization of matter as it is for the organization of information processing.

1) There are other mathematical structures that are not applicable to physical world as we see it. And there cannot be a limit on number of mathematical structures.

2) Mathematics as we construct and apply are deterministic, it cannot deal with indeterminism. Laying down the probabilities is not a description of the physical function.

3) If a priori truth of mathematics is equivalent to physical universe, then description of the universe had the reality of eternity beyond time; there could not be anything that has not happened, and there could not be anything that is not happening at each moment of time. Indeterminism comes to rescue here again to save the universe from the eternity of the mathematical laws. Prof Max Tegmark is off the mark maximally.

By the way, I apply the following statement of yours, "because there are structures that can’t not exist – mathematical structures", in a slightly different way. An universe has no existence if there is no pattern, no constancy in the function of its elements, but then given any correlation or constancy of relation, it cannot avoid exemplifying a mathematical structure.

As an aside, it appears that you have practiced Vipassana technique of meditation, it is not possible to be so accurate in articulating without having gone through the experience.

I like very much your detailed and well thought observations. I see that the agreement between our views is far from being total, and I am glad for this.

> You take this example to defend the emergence of indeterministic statistical laws from deterministic processes at the most fundamental level.

This is kind of the standard way to derive statistical mechanics, and works whether or not is determinism at the lowest level (possibility which I allowed, see |2>). In addition, there is a way to have both deterministic evolution and free choice, by delayed initial conditions (which appears in the QM interpretation I prefer, see this and this).

> indeterminism may arise only if at the fundamental level also many to one, and one to many mapping occur in the state space

This is interesting. I am curious how can it be done. The closest thing to this I can imagine is in the links I gave above.

I liked your remarks about information, especially being relational, semantic, and not having to be discrete. Relation is what matters, and relation also means mathematical structure, so I think there is much agreement between what (I think) you say and my previous essay.

I only replied to a part of your comments, but thank you for all of them, and I'm looking forward to read your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Rajiv K Singh replied on Mar. 11, 2017 @ 17:45 GMT

Cristi, Hi !

While following your pointers I learned just now that I made a mistake in addressing you in my comment to your essay. It certainly shows that I did not know about you, and did not try to find out who you were. I am sorry about my ignorance ! Ah! but I am also a bit disappointed, as I was appreciating such 'sharp' reasoning from some one else !

You have not responded to some other points that I mentioned in my first comment, I was hoping that you would get back to them as you seemed to have indicated. Also, we may have some other points to discuss about the centrality of semantics of information and abstraction, but I was holding on since I thought it would be more meaningful once you happened to read my essay as you indicated.

Looks like quantum mechanics is holding the central fort in the discussions on this topic. And my guess is that it is largely due to certain mystery around its formulation. But it is entirely possible that this kind of focus on certain limited aspect may have taken the attention of the scientific community away from something simpler that is deeply connected with the problem.

Even though I had noted that you did not conclude one way or the other about the definitive emergence of aims and intentions, but I still found your essay to be one of the best so far that I read because of its wide ranging coverage and intuitive reasoning. To my mind, sometimes conclusion is less important, unless definitive, than bringing forth all relevant issues with comprehensive understanding.

Thanks for coming back, I just found now your message. I am traveling and was very busy to prepare 20h of talks and now to deliver them, but your essay is on my todo list of readings, which if I will not be able to do during my travel, I will continue when I return, in two weeks.

Best regards,

Cristi

Rajiv K Singh replied on Apr. 12, 2017 @ 12:55 GMT

Dear Cristi,

Now that rating system and formal evaluation are out of context, we may take up issues between us informally. I certainly had hoped that you would do a thorough job of evaluating my essay as I did to yours. Also, because given your diverse coverage on this subject, I was sure that you will grasp my essay comprehensively. But you made a few nice remarks about certain statements,...

Now that rating system and formal evaluation are out of context, we may take up issues between us informally. I certainly had hoped that you would do a thorough job of evaluating my essay as I did to yours. Also, because given your diverse coverage on this subject, I was sure that you will grasp my essay comprehensively. But you made a few nice remarks about certain statements, and left at that. In place of picking agreeable statements, a person like you should give a real thrashing if you did not agree.

As you liked the statement, "an information is necessarily semantic in our consideration", therefore, I presume you may agree with me on why and how all state descriptions of physical entities naturally carry semantic values of information without any need for an interpreter. I had also hoped that you would observe how information processing takes place at each interaction. You may then notice that all interactions could be described as 'disjunction of conjunctions of state descriptions of participating physical entities', which leads naturally to build up of semantic values by the same expression.

Once you noted the process of semantics emerging from exchange of information at each interaction, then it was only a matter of arranging the interaction, such that higher level abstract semantics emerge. Of course, I had hoped that you would also notice in surprise that 'disjunction of conjunction of semantic values' is the way neural systems seem to be carrying out their processing.

Moreover, once it is shown that higher level semantics can be the correlation of active states of higher level neurons, then it is easy for natural evolution to achieve selection of only those action pathways that were in line with optimizing certain higher level abstract semantics (reward values). Of course, my description was short, and therefore, I was expecting a good deal of attack from you.

My hope of receiving a good criticism from you was dashed into dust ! This format of competitive race is not always in line with filtering the better ideas.

You also responded with, "Information is always relative to something, but if all that is information, one should stop somewhere, and that place should be the source of the meaning." I am not sure, I fully grasped that, but there can a boot strapping process of information build up, which is not fully described in this essay though.

1. This optimism is fueled by the foundation of the entire physics on a few laws we know, of general relativity and gravity, quantum theory, and the Standard Model of particles, which indeed fit on a tablet. This makes us hope that the solutions of puzzles like dark matter, dark energy, and quantum...

1. This optimism is fueled by the foundation of the entire physics on a few laws we know, of general relativity and gravity, quantum theory, and the Standard Model of particles, which indeed fit on a tablet. This makes us hope that the solutions of puzzles like dark matter, dark energy, and quantum gravity, will still fit on a tablet

2. A useful picture of how a theory of the universe works is given by dynamical systems. The set of all possible states of a system are collected in a space. Then, we need a rule to specify how the system changes from one state to the next usually an equation………………….

For your information Dynamic Universe model is doing exactly this as you have mentioned in quote 2……

It is totally based on experimental results. Here in Dynamic Universe Model Space is Space and time is time in cosmology level or in any level. In the classical general relativity, space and time are convertible in to each other.

Many papers and books on Dynamic Universe Model were published by the author on unsolved problems of present day Physics, for example ‘Absolute Rest frame of reference is not necessary’ (1994) , ‘Multiple bending of light ray can create many images for one Galaxy: in our dynamic universe’, About “SITA” simulations, ‘Missing mass in Galaxy is NOT required’, “New mathematics tensors without Differential and Integral equations”, “Information, Reality and Relics of Cosmic Microwave Background”, “Dynamic Universe Model explains the Discrepancies of Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Observations.”, in 2015 ‘Explaining Formation of Astronomical Jets Using Dynamic Universe Model, ‘Explaining Pioneer anomaly’, ‘Explaining Near luminal velocities in Astronomical jets’, ‘Observation of super luminal neutrinos’, ‘Process of quenching in Galaxies due to formation of hole at the center of Galaxy, as its central densemass dries up’, “Dynamic Universe Model Predicts the Trajectory of New Horizons Satellite Going to Pluto” etc., are some more papers from the Dynamic Universe model. Four Books also were published. Book1 shows Dynamic Universe Model is singularity free and body to collision free, Book 2, and Book 3 are explanation of equations of Dynamic Universe model. Book 4 deals about prediction and finding of Blue shifted Galaxies in the universe.

With axioms like… No Isotropy; No Homogeneity; No Space-time continuum; Non-uniform density of matter(Universe is lumpy); No singularities; No collisions between bodies; No Blackholes; No warm holes; No Bigbang; No repulsion between distant Galaxies; Non-empty Universe; No imaginary or negative time axis; No imaginary X, Y, Z axes; No differential and Integral Equations mathematically; No General Relativity and Model does not reduce to General Relativity on any condition; No Creation of matter like Bigbang or steady-state models; No many mini Bigbangs; No Missing Mass; No Dark matter; No Dark energy; No Bigbang generated CMB detected; No Multi-verses etc.

Many predictions of Dynamic Universe Model came true, like Blue shifted Galaxies and no dark matter. Dynamic Universe Model gave many results otherwise difficult to explain

Hope you will have a look at my essay on Dynamic Universe Model and its blog also where all my books and papers are available for free downloading…

Thank you for the comments and the information about your essay, which I am looking forward to read.

Best wishes,

Cristi (no Professor)

adel sadeq wrote on Mar. 13, 2017 @ 21:35 GMT

Dear Christinel,

I read your papers and I like your style of writing in a clear and concise manner. I don't know why I have not commented on your paper in the last contest. Generally I have given up on FQXI as being the right platform for discussing my idea(actually a theory:)) although I did manage to get some people like Gibbs and Torsten to comment. However, probably you and maybe Crowell(who always seem to be busy!) will be my only hope for some comment on my idea. I hope you browse my last year essay, it is short and the results are easy to check. This year( it is short because of last minute and not feeling well) I show that my simulations are very very close to a potential of the Helmann type , which is a combination of coulomb's potential and Yukawa's but with a different interpretation. Also from the same system that generates all the quantum mechanical results I generate Newton's gravity law(just check it out if you don't believe it)

Thank you for the comments, and for suggesting me to read your essay. I intend to read it before the end of the contest, but perhaps you will want more detailed comments. Right now I have to prepare for a travel and make lots of slides, so maybe my answer will not come very soon, but please feel free to remind me. Good luck!

I found your essay to be well written and easy to read, but I was unconvinced by what seems to be the main point of the essay:

We arrive at the conclusion that the only necessary existence is mathematical existence. Physical universes don't exist with necessity, so it is legitimate to ask why they exist. But mathematical structures exist with necessity, in mathematical sense, and they are a priori truths.

The question “why is there something rather than nothing?” can be answered by: “because there are structures that can't not exist - mathematical structures”.

Seemingly you are saying that every possible mathematical structure must exist. In fact, it is not necessary that every possible mathematical structure must exist: such an idea is completely overblown and excessive! What is necessary is that the universe has the ability to generate its “mathematical structures” (e.g. law-of-nature rules).

The Aeon essay “Parallel worlds” by Andrew Crumey, a novelist with a PhD in physics, discusses the writings of German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin asserts that the idea that reality is configured so that every possible outcome exists is dehumanising, a damning reflection on the society that produces such an idea, and that such dehumanisation led to the rise of fascism:

For Benjamin, however, the multiverse is not an intellectual parlour game, but a damning reflection of the society that produces it.

In a proposed introduction to The Arcades Project, Benjamin compares Blanqui’s multiverse to Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les sept vieillards’ (‘The Seven Old Men’, 1857), which takes a succession of identical old men and imagines them as a single man multiplied in some ‘infamous plot’. This, says Benjamin, is an image of modernity itself. An eventual consequence of such dehumanisation was the rise of fascism.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, more or less related to my essay. Just to clarify: the conclusion you quote from my essay is derived from what I wrote earlier, "let’s try to see what constituents of the universe could very well not exist". If that would be the main conclusion of the essay, then you should expect to find it in the concluding section, but it is not there. In fact, in the concluding section I wrote "At the top of the pyramid are life and consciousness, and they should be the center of science too". I advocated more for placing humanity at the core of science here.

Re. your P.S., I think dehumanization is the tendency to reduce others and their words to carefully chosen caricatures. These days so many attempt to prove their righteousness by simply calling the views different from their own nazist, communist, or fascist. Is there a unique right way which everyone, and even the universe, should adopt? If some physicist found reasons to think that quantum mechanics implies many-worlds, or sum-over-histories, or that inflation leads to multiverse, should we reject them because we think this is dehumanizing, rather than on the ground of reason? Should a vast 13.7 billion years old universe comply to what some decades old locals think it is morally right? Some considered classical physics, by its determinism, dehumanizing by the apparent lack of free-will, while others like Sam Harris think that the belief in free-will itself is dehumanizing, by making us hate others (like "they can behave well, but they don't want to, so they deserve my hate"). Evolution is still considered by many dehumanizing, as it is science itself. The duty of scientists is to listen to the story the universe has to tell us, and avoid their own philosophical or religious biases. But at the same time, as I said, people have to be at the center of the entire scientific activity.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Lorraine Ford replied on Mar. 15, 2017 @ 01:25 GMT

Dear Cristi,

“If mathematical structures exist anyway, and if the universe is isomorphic to a mathematical structure (Stoica, 2015b, 2016d), do we need something more to explain why there is something rather than nothing? This leads us straight to Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis (Tegmark, 2008, 1998, 2014), which posits that physical existence equals mathematical existence - in other words, logical possibility equals reality. Accordingly, we are just substructures of such a mathematical structure, we observe the structure as it appears to us, and ask questions like the one in the title17. One can object to the identification of physical existence with mathematical existence by claiming that the latter is imaginary. But I think this is a different kind of imaginary, since it is consistent.”

Re the above-mentioned hypothesis that the universe is isomorphic to a mathematical structure which you say “leads us straight to Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis”:

You claim that “people have to be at the center of the entire scientific activity”. But how could people be at the centre of the entire scientific activity if we live in a multiverse where just as many universes exist where people are not the centre of the entire scientific activity? Tegmark’s multiverse implies that every good work that I personally do is countered by a universe in which I do just as many bad works: this view of reality IS dehumanising. Physicists’ views of reality influence people’s attitudes towards reality: ideas spread quickly and far and wide. How can physicists disclaim responsibility for the effects that their views have on people’s attitudes towards reality, and on people’s attitudes towards themselves and their good works?

When I say "people should be at the centre of the entire scientific activity", I don't mean that we should reject any physical law or hypothesis which makes humans appear insignificant. The universe has its laws, and while we appeared by virtue of these laws, Nature doesn't seem to care about us. Nature hits us with epidemics, catastrophes, aging and death. It just doesn't seem to care. What I said it is that WE should care. And science appeared as a means to convert Nature on our side. Not by denying its laws, but by curiosity, by loving and trying to understand Nature. For this, scientists propose hypotheses, with the purpose of explaining the laws of Nature. Either by curiosity, or to learn how to improve human's lives.

You asked: "how could people be at the centre of the entire scientific activity if we live in a multiverse where just as many universes exist where people are not the centre of the entire scientific activity?"

May I ask in turn "how could people be at the centre of the entire scientific activity if we live in a 13.7 billion year old universe where humans exist only for 100 000 years, and as far as we know, only on a tiny pale blue dot, out of an infinitely vast number of planets?"

I think we should consider any hypothesis that has explanatory power, no matter how speculative may appear. Do you think that we should choose only the hypotheses that make us feel good about ourselves? This would sabotage our efforts to understand Nature, and therefore to improve humans' lives.

What if Newton decided to burn his theory of mechanics, because in a world where mechanics determines everything, people will not have free-will, will not be accountable or rewardable for what they do?

Should we execute guys like the Church did with Giordano Bruno, who dared to claim that human's planet is not at the center of the universe, and that many other worlds may exist?

Should we refute Maxwell's equations, theory of relativity, and any deterministic theory, because we don't like our deeds to be predetermined by imutable laws? Should we refute quantum mechanics, because we don't like that its intrinsic randomness implies that our deeds are random? Should we refute evolution because it says that we are what we are because of random chance?

You say "Tegmark’s multiverse implies that every good work that I personally do is countered by a universe in which I do just as many bad works: this view of reality IS dehumanising.". I don't even think that from the MUH follows that YOU in other worlds are bad. It may be someone with your name and many similarity with you which is bad in other worlds, but that is not you. You are what you are in this worlds. The other "you"s are not you, even if they may share the same DNA, because they have different histories, different choices. I can understand your frustration that all your good nature and efforts to do good works will only apply to this version of you, and are not guaranteed to also apply to other versions. So what? You are different from them.

But I find this more humanizing than you think. Because it makes us think that in different situation, we may have made some choices for which we now so easily blame or despise other people. This gives us the opportunity to realize that we shouldn't blame others for what they are, if we are not in their shoes. And I think this is the most humanizing thing.

Just like you are so proud of what you did in this world and are afraid that if the multiverse is true, some other "you" may do some bad things in that world, there may be others in this world who regret their doings, and hope that in other world they would do better. Or people who may find comfort that in other worlds a tragedy that happened to someone they loved didn't happen.

"How can physicists disclaim responsibility for the effects that their views have on people’s attitudes towards reality, and on people’s attitudes towards themselves and their good works?"

If you are so responsible, then how can you not think that the multiverse may be a chance of redemption or of a completely better life than this one, how can you disclaim responsibility for the effects of your view?

I have two boys, and the youngest one is severely autistic. It was not the choice of me and my wife to be so. If there is a cause, the cause is Nature, but I don't blame Her. I don't blame the laws of physics and evolution for doing this to him, and to many others. If God exists, should I blame Him for not being as good and merciful as advertised? If there is someone to blame, maybe it is more practical to blame the corrupt government, which doesn't care about these problems, and because of which I need to have two jobs just to be able to provide him therapy (which leads to very small progress anyway). If the multiverse theory will be proven to be true somehow (which I doubt), should I just institutionalize him and be comfortable that in a parallel world he is OK? I don't think so, I just have to do my best to take care of him in this world, and give him the best chance I can, no matter how the universe is, how God is, and how the government is. I see no moral implications at all of the multiverse in this issue, in any possible world my duty is to do my best. And I see no moral implications in other aspects of our lives. We just do our best, that's all. I leave the game of blame to others.

So far, all scientific ideas and technological advances were found offensive and dehumanizing by some. Yet, I think that you can see statistics showing that in overall human behavior improved in time. I doubt you have any study that shows that the multiverse ideas led to dehumanization and to fascism or other bad things. It is just a worry you have.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Lorraine Ford replied on Mar. 15, 2017 @ 19:14 GMT

Dear Cristi,

I think you underestimate the problems with the multiverse and mathematical universe ideas. I’m sure reality is not quite as senseless and weird as your model of the universe makes out. The model of reality in my essay (The Universe as a System that Generates its Own Rules) presents a more logical way to look at the nature of the universe, that is not “offensive and dehumanising”.

I didn't read your essay yet, but I don't think we should choose the laws of physics* by the criterion that they make us feel good. Maybe we can choose the interpretation of them by this or whatever personal criterion we have, but not the laws themselves. This would not be science, and would not allow us to advance in our reconciliation with the universe.

I don't know where in my essay you read that I said the universe is senseless. In fact, in my essay I advocate that sentience or subjective experience is irreducible, and that we may be able to explore it by subjective means like meditation. For example "almost all features of consciousness are conceivably reducible to information processing of one sort or another. If something resists, this is subjective experience. In the absence of an absolute ground to rely on, I think what we really know is that we are, and that there are mathematical truths." Even if I am wrong, I think this insistence in cherry picking to support your derogatory moral judgements of my words is the most dehumanizing act I saw on this forum. You may have your own motivations to do this, but I think this is gratuitous.

Best regards,

Cristi

________________________

* Not that I consider any of the ideas of multiverse, many-worlds, or mathematical universe, as scientifically proven, or even provable.

Lorraine Ford replied on Mar. 15, 2017 @ 23:08 GMT

Dear Cristi,

I’m sorry you have taken what I said to be a personal criticism. In fact, I have no ill will towards you – far from it. You are correct that I am cherry picking out ideas from essays for criticism. Because I have long been interested in these ideas about the fundamental nature of reality, and how this relates to our here and now human reality, ever since I studied physics at university 45 years ago. So I would hope that, if you read my essay, you would feel free to criticise any ideas you disagree with, and not just say nice things.

If the schema that you espouse is true, i.e. that all “logical possibility equals reality” (page 8, The Tablet of the Metalaw), then every Me who does a good work is balanced by a Me who does a bad work. This is the realm of madness, the realm in which you say don’t worry that Donald Trump got into power, because in another universe the logical possibility is that people voted differently, and Hilary Clinton got into power.

The alternative to madness is to say that, out of all logical possibilities, the inherent nature of reality is such that it allows only one possibility to be chosen.

You said "every Me who does a good work is balanced by a Me who does a bad work".

There is nothing like you pulling at one end of a rope in this world, and another you in another world pulling at the other. If there are multiple worlds, they are independent.

If someone would say "don’t worry that Donald Trump got into power, because in another universe the logical possibility is that people voted differently, and Hilary Clinton got into power", I would say too that that person is mad. Of course is mad, because the better universe is that where Bernie Sanders is president :)

Leaving the joke aside, I know many people who believe in one form or another of parallel universes, and so far I never saw one of them saying that one should not care about a bad thing in this world, because there is another world in which that thing didn't happen. (What's curious is that most people believe that if a bad injustice happens here to a person, that person will be compensated after he or she dies; that if someone is born with a disability, that person (if is good enough) will be cured in the after world as if nothing bad happened. Is this a world of madness too?)

The reason why people who believe in parallel universes don't find comfort that there is a parallel world where Hilary Clinton is president, is because they live in this one, and they can't emigrate into the other. So for all practical purposes, it is irrelevant to them if there are other worlds in which better events took place instead the ones they don't like in this world.

In fact I already answered this, in my reply to you on Mar. 15, 2017 @ 05:22 GMT. I explained that these worlds are separated, and even if there is someone looking like you and with the same name as you in another world, this is a different person. They can't balance their works, because they work on independent stuff. And that even if something bad happens to one or somebody one loves, one can't find comfort in thinking about a world in which everything is fine. We have to do our best in this world. Sorry for repeating myself, but the question was repeated.

Roxanne had failed to notice that she continually collapsed the “quantum probabilities” of her own body into a single outcome, within the limits of deterministic law-of-nature rules (i.e. miraculous “Healing people, levitating, moving objects” are not possible). Each time, she collapsed the quantum probabilities by generating a new one-off local rule that had the deterministic effect of resetting the numeric value of one of the uncertain variables. This ability to generate initial-value rules allowed her the partial freedom to navigate within the universe-system, as opposed to her being fully controlled by the system rules.

She hadn’t realised that nature is economical, i.e. it simply generates rules as required (without ever breaking existing law-of-nature rules), because she had googled a fake news physics website which told her that all logically possible rules (including all initial-value rules) must physically exist in separate universes.

With great interest I read your essay, which of course is worthy of high praise.

I share your dream

«Many physicists share the dream that sooner or later we will know the fundamental physical laws, the equations describing them, and that they will be unified in a single theory which fits on a t-shirt, or perhaps on a stone tablet – the tablet of the law.»

In my opinion, the task is how to gradually abandon the use of abstract concepts and ideal (supernatural) properties of matter and fields.

Because you are right «most scientists seem to agree that materialism won».

Since you «Interested especially in the geometric aspects of the physical laws»

consider: «The alternative seems to be to give up the very hope of having a realistic description, and admit as real only the probabilities.»

«Why does the world appears classical to our direct experience, rather than being populated by Schr ̈odinger cats? The classical level seems to defeat the quantum level.»

Therefore, perhaps my essay will complement your understanding of the determinism and causes of quantum and physical processes that begin with the geometric fractal structure of matter.

Can my ideas serve as an intermediate and connecting link between Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics?

I have no illusions, but I will not hide, I would like to receive an answer - why it is not, as I believe, more likely by mail and perhaps not now.

I appreciate your comments, as well as your connections you make between my essay and yours, which from what you wrote seems interesting, especially by proposing a connection between Einstein's general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Best regards,

Criti

David Pinyana wrote on Mar. 16, 2017 @ 10:47 GMT

Another interesting article that deals with the different spatial scales and emerging concepts.

It is clear that these concepts are the future and now the first steps (from a conceptual form) are being presented and should be adequately demonstrated and verified,

Please read my article that deals with these concepts but focuses on Cosmology. THE SCALE LANDSCAPES OF THE UNIVERSE ( http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2925 ),

Happy to see the Standard Model Algebra paper on your author page. Would like to understand more, see how to connect it with the work Michaele Suisse and I have been doing on the same subject Suisse FQXi essay

Thank you for the comments. Indeed, Clifford algebras seem to be present everywhere in physics.

Best regards,

Cristi

Laurence Hitterdale wrote on Mar. 20, 2017 @ 00:11 GMT

Dear Cristinel,

I appreciate your essay, which manages to be wide-ranging, coherent, and intelligible, all at the same time. One question that occurs to me concerns the relationship between the scale of values and the structure of reality as a multilevel pyramid. In section 12 you seem to indicate that life and consciousness are more important and more valuable than entities and processes at lower levels. Do life and consciousness have this distinction because they are at the top of the pyramid, and the pyramidal structure itself inherently requires that items at each level be more important and more valuable than items at lower levels? Or does this steady increase of importance and value with rise in levels not obtain? Then, in that case there would be some other reason why the items at the apex are of the highest importance.

"In section 12 you seem to indicate that life and consciousness are more important and more valuable than entities and processes at lower levels. Do life and consciousness have this distinction because they are at the top of the pyramid, and the pyramidal structure itself inherently requires that items at each level be more important and more valuable than items at lower levels? Or does this steady increase of importance and value with rise in levels not obtain? Then, in that case there would be some other reason why the items at the apex are of the highest importance."

The fundamental low-level laws seem not to be concerned about life and consciousness. But also the notions of value and importance themselves are apparently not present at the fundamental level, they seem to appear at the top level. So the worst case scenario is that only consciousness considers itself to be important. Value and importance are somehow self-referential. So at least from this point of view they are most important. Let's just say that at least to consciousness itself, life and consciousness are most important.

Best regards,

Cristi

Laurence Hitterdale replied on Mar. 24, 2017 @ 17:37 GMT

Dear Cristi

“Value and importance are somehow self-referential. So at least from this point of view they are most important. Let's just say that at least to consciousness itself, life and consciousness are most important.”

Thank you, and I'm happy to meet you again! I look forward to read your essay!

Best regards,

Cristi

Jochen Szangolies wrote on Mar. 22, 2017 @ 15:38 GMT

Dear Christinel,

thank you for an interesting essay. I like your depiction of the pyramid of higher levels of description, one emerging from the other, yet to a certain extent being independent---in such a way that one can have a meaningful chemistry, or biology, or even sociology, without needing to fix the fundamental level completely.

Also, I got a little excited at your mentioning von Neumann's universal replicators, which play a prominent role in my own essay, which tries to attack the problem of meaning and goal-directedness in the somewhat less 'universal' context of a toy model.

I'm not really on board with the whole 'mathematical universe'-idea, however; to me, it seems like a textbook example of mistaking the map for the territory. In terms of more popular philosophical terminology, I think Tegmark's idea is essentially a variant of ontic structural realism, and as such, has to deal with the famed Newman objection that any given structure really doesn't contain more information than simply the cardinality of the set it supervenes on; but that seems too little information to build a world from.

I'm glad to see you at this contest, and thank you for the comments. Interesting objection to Tegmark's MUH. Well, I see it as a matter of personal taste, but I think that it is not as simple to object. In my previous essay I took more space to explain why I think the universe is mathematical, which here I didn't want to do again. I would say that what we think so far is the mathematical description of the universe is indeed a map, as you said.

Best regards,

Cristi

Yehuda Atai wrote on Mar. 22, 2017 @ 19:29 GMT

Hi Cristinel,

I liked your essay and it seems that you are puzzling the topic-subject from the proper and right questions.

You state: "Maybe subjective experience emerges from the organization of matter, or as a property of information, like integration. Then, since matter is always structured and always processes information, we arrive at a kind of panpsychism reducible to the structure and information of matter."

I see the phenomena in space the same way. It is all subjective information even in the experience of two existents relating to each other, whether it's a sub particle or a waive.

All phenomena are: unique, in unity, in plurality (though there are Hevert and Vaidman that think that there is multiple worlds and as such can be a single movement alone in its lonely universe) and have an End as a self-organization phenomenon from a grain of sand to galaxis.

Causality principle is working within our physical laws as a special case in the occurrence of phenomena.(see my essay :"we are together, therefore I am)

Maybe (reality is possible and Not pre determine), your mathematical approach could find the sub-strata of the natural language of movements that I call for.

Thank you for your remarks. I see we have some common points, but also some differences, which is great. Causality is a very deep topic that still surprises us. Good luck with the contest!

Best regards,

Cristi

Avtar Singh wrote on Mar. 23, 2017 @ 15:12 GMT

Dear Cristi Stoica:

I enjoyed reading your paper and agree completely with your statement – “There is a fundamental level of reality, but there are also higher levels, each with its own life, and not so rooted in the lower levels and reducible to them as one may want to think. At the top of the pyramid are life and consciousness, and they should be the center of science too. ….. No...

I enjoyed reading your paper and agree completely with your statement – “There is a fundamental level of reality, but there are also higher levels, each with its own life, and not so rooted in the lower levels and reducible to them as one may want to think. At the top of the pyramid are life and consciousness, and they should be the center of science too. ….. No hypothesis should be refuted because physics doesn’t predict it yet or seems to contradict it, especially since such contradictions exist even between different parts of physics……Any activity that helps you come up with scientific hypotheses is useful, from philosophy to arts and even to myths. Hypotheses have the first word, but logical consistency and experiments have the last word.”

FQXi is a unique forum to address key open issues related to science that impact humanity and life. The mainstream science has treated the universe, laws, and fundamental particles as inanimate entities devoid of life, consciousness, or free will. As a result, the mainstream theories of science are also devoid of consciousness or free will. While science, especially quantum mechanics, recognizes the spontaneous free-willed (without any cause) birth and decay of particles out of the Zero-point vacuum as a fundamental physical phenomenon, it refutes existence of free will via consciously labeling it as “Randomness” in nature. This vicious circle has failed science in two ways – first is its erroneous prediction of a purposeless universe and life in it making the science itself purposeless and meaningless from a deeper human perspective. Secondly, ignorance of consciousness or free will which is a fundamental dimension of the universe along with mass/energy/space/time leaves scientific theories incomplete leading to their current paradoxes and internal inconsistencies.

Just like a dead mother cannot nurture and give birth to a living baby, a dead universe governed by inanimate laws cannot support any living systems within it. Universal consciousness is fundamental to the emergence and sustenance of any living system – quantum or biological. The mathematical laws must be living to give rise to living aims and intentions. If the fundamentality of the consciousness of the universe and laws is not understood, a scientific theory would be like a castle built on sand.

FQXi forum is participated by brilliant and accomplished scientists representing in-depth knowledge and expertise in diverse fields. I would propose that the forum scientists take on a challenge to enhance and uplift science from its current status quo as an incomplete science of the inanimate (dead) matter to the wholesome science of the living and conscious universe. This would complete science and make it purposeful and meaningful adding to its current successes as a tool for enhancing material life alone. Science deserves its long-awaited recognition to address not only matter but mind as well and not only material but spiritual life as well. Considering the current political and economic threats to the basic survival of science and religious extremism/terrorism threatening the fundamental freedom (free will) of humanity, the role of a wholesome and genuine science has become even more vital to humanity.

I have forwarded a humble and example proposal detailing how a consciousness-integrated scientific model of the universe entailing matter-mind could be developed that resolves current paradoxes of science including QM, predicts the observed universe, and offers a testable theory via future empirical observations. This proposal and theory are documented in my contest paper.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback as well as constructive criticism of the proposed approach in my paper to advance physics and cosmology.

Thank you for the comments, which are very interesting. I think science indeed is very cautious, and as we slowly clarify the picture of the universe using at least for the moment matter building blocks without life, we may still get to realize what parts of the puzzle may be missing, and add them when we will be forced. At least I hope that we will not stop inquiring. For instance, although in this essay I allowed myself to speculate more than usually, in general I try to use as much as possible what we know for sure, and hope that at the end it will be clear what properties and things we need to add. The rule would be: use reductionism as much as possible, and when stuck, introduce new entities. One should never say that something reduces to something, like consciousness reduces to matter, if one can't prove it. One can say that one expects or hopes to reduce it, but until proven, one should not treat the problem as solved. Thanks again for your comments.

Best regards,

Cristi

Alfredo Gouveia Oliveira wrote on Mar. 24, 2017 @ 11:34 GMT

Dear Cristinel Stoica

When I started reading your essay, my first though was: “another essay that goes around around and does not get anywhere”. Well, I couldn’t stop reading! Indeed, it does not give a pragmatic contribution to the theme of the contest – in this aspect, it is totally different of mine – but it gives a lot of important contributions for those that are committed to...

When I started reading your essay, my first though was: “another essay that goes around around and does not get anywhere”. Well, I couldn’t stop reading! Indeed, it does not give a pragmatic contribution to the theme of the contest – in this aspect, it is totally different of mine – but it gives a lot of important contributions for those that are committed to understand the universe. Although I think that only those that have developed the same kind of wandering can really understand some of the things you say - “one’s experience is not contagious…”.

Some of those things are speculative, others quite concrete. From the former, it is interesting that you say “… while physical existence, known to us only by empirical evidence, is unnecessary, in the sense that another universe is possible, in which that particular physical structure or law doesn’t exist physically”. Well, it seems so… but maybe not! Because the universe seems to have a characteristic that defines it univocally: to be as simple as possible. Many years ago I put myself the following question: “ if I was God, how would I make this universe?” (this is a technique of solving mysteries). I did not obtained a full answer, of course, but I obtained a conception of the universe different from standard one… and much simpler! And that conception allowed to me solve some current “mysteries”. Anyhow, the relevant point for now is that this universe may be still more unique than mathematics. But I discovered also that it has properties others than the ones of matter. We are just in the very beginning…

One concrete statement of yours is very important but often ignored: “ No hypothesis should be refuted because physics doesn’t predict it yet or seems to contradict it … Hypotheses have the first word, but logical consistency and experiments have the last word ”. During my life I have become a sort of expert in solving problems others failed to solve; how? not only by analyzing the hypotheses that for others were obviously wrong but also by becoming able of generating hypotheses that are impossible to occur to normal persons… by reasons that Descartes explained. But to be able to do it, one has to get a deep understanding of some peculiar characteristics of mind – and you show that you have it.

In short, I liked your essay, I found it stimulating and inspiring, and I give you a vote in accordance with what I feel.

Thank you for your comments, you made some interesting observations. In particular I like the idea of starting from the question "if I was God, how would I make this universe?", which may lead to many interesting results and is a good personal/philosophical question. I like that you are attracted to solving problems that other seem to consider unsolvable, I think I try to do the same. For instance, finding a finite description of general relativistic singularities, or a non-collapse description of quantum mechanics, or a compact unification of the standard model without predicting new particles or forces. I wish you good luck in the contest!

Best regards,

Cristi

Member Marc Séguin wrote on Mar. 27, 2017 @ 01:55 GMT

Dear Cristi,

Good to see you again in this contest. Very interesting essay, as always! In section 4, I liked the way you explained the disconnect between different levels of description with the analogy of the floating levels of the pyramid, to get the point across that “mindless” mathematical laws and “goals and intention” need not be incompatible, since they live at different...

Good to see you again in this contest. Very interesting essay, as always! In section 4, I liked the way you explained the disconnect between different levels of description with the analogy of the floating levels of the pyramid, to get the point across that “mindless” mathematical laws and “goals and intention” need not be incompatible, since they live at different levels. In section 5, I liked the analogy between no-go theorems and apophatic theology.

In section 7, you made intriguing remarks about the classical level imposing constraints on the quantum level: “the classical level always seems to win”. I will have to check your recent arXiv papers on wavefunction collapse to try to understand this better.

In section 9, I quite liked your explanation of the difficulty to clearly state what the hard problem of consciousness is all about: “Perhaps whenever we try to define it, we do it in objective terms, which makes it trivial and irrelevant.”

In sections 10 and 11, I obviously liked the way you answered why there is something instead of nothing, “because there are structures that can’t not exist --- mathematical structures”, and how you noted that “what we really know is that we are, and that there are mathematical truths.” In my essay, I continued to explore the consequences of the Level IV/Ultimate Multiverse/Maxiverse hypothesis that I defended last time, turning the essay’s question on its head to try to see if we can explain how conscious agents with aims and intention can give rise to the “mindless” mathematical/physical laws that ensure the stability/lawfulness of the world we observe. The “co-emergence” hypothesis that I came up with still needs to be fleshed out, but I believe it is a promising avenue to explore if we hope ultimately to explain the lawfulness of our universe without invoking a purposeful creator/designer or having to take the “arbitrary” laws of physics that seem to rule our universe as starting axioms that cannot be further justified.

I am glad to see that your essay is doing well in the contest. Mine has remained fairly obscure, and the fact that I have been reading essays without commenting or grading them (which I am just beginning to do now) must not have helped. But since I was lucky enough to win 2nd place and become a member last time, the ratings game is less important for me. I hope you once again get a prize this time and eventually win one of the top prizes --- that would be awesome!

Thank you very much for the comments and for pointing out the things you liked at my essay. I enjoyed very much your previous essay, which won a well-deserved prize, and I look forward to read your last essay. It is on my todo list and I hope to get to it soon, especially now, when you gave me a taste of it by your comments. Especially the co-emergence hypothesis makes me want to learn more. Thank you very much for the wishes, and I hope your essay will do at least as good as last time!

Best wishes,

Cristi

Vladimir F. Tamari wrote on Mar. 28, 2017 @ 10:55 GMT

Hello Cristinel nice to see you back here and to read your comprehensive essay on the contest question. From a possible set of laws that describe all physics to human consciousness and beyond.

One of the things you mention is Cellular Automata and indeed the pyramid illustration seems to indicate the possibility of a physics such as Wolfram dreamed of. It you think about it a CA is local, causal, linear and has no time dimension - it hardly allows the emergence of the pillars of modern physics such as general relativity of quantum mechanics. Recently however Gerard 't Hooft has shown that CA can lead to QM. I was happy about that because my own Beautiful Universe Model is one type of CA. But proposing a fundamental model is not enough, To give it room to be developed existing theories have to be vetted and stripped of their unnatural premises and incompatible modii operandi. I tried to do that in my fqxi essay. I will be honored if you have a look.

Thank you for your comments and I'm happy to see you back here too. You are right, CA's are very rich structures, despite the simplicity of their rules, some of them are after all Turing complete. So 't Hooft is right that this may describe quantum behavior. I look forward to read your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

David Pinyana wrote on Mar. 29, 2017 @ 04:53 GMT

Cristinel,

You say:

"Many physicists share the dream that sooner or later we will know the fundamental physical laws, the equations describing them, and that they will be unified in a single theory which fits on a t-shirt, or perhaps on a stone tablet – the tablet of the law.

I know this dream is just a matter of belief. There is no reason to be true – why would the universe be fundamentally simple, completely describable by a finite set of laws? "

I say in my essay:

"ToEs are just theories that try to cover a wider range of dimensional scales of the Whole Universe spectrum. But each time this spectrum is enlarged, new laws and concepts will emerge (new Landscapes).

If we discover new scale spectra (landscapes), there also will appear (emerge) new concepts and physical laws (unexpected and difficult to predict), and we will require the development of new models and patterns to understand these new physical landscapes/spectra.

May we believe that there will be some basic and elementary objects (and laws), since which there will be nothing smaller? Only if this were so, then we could think on getting a TOE based on these elementary and basic objects and laws."

> "ToEs are just theories that try to cover a wider range of dimensional scales of the Whole Universe spectrum. But each time this spectrum is enlarged, new laws and concepts will emerge (new Landscapes)."

I agree that most likely we will never have a definite reason to believe that a theory is final, and this can be seen in my essay soon after the first page from which you quoted.

> May we believe that there will be some basic and elementary objects (and laws), since which there will be nothing smaller? Only if this were so, then we could think on getting a TOE based on these elementary and basic objects and laws."

Not necessarily. Positive integers are made of a smallest unit, yet the completeness of their theory can't be proven. Euclidean geometry doesn't have a smallest unit, but can you find in it new laws or objects?

Conrad Dale Johnson wrote on Mar. 29, 2017 @ 16:46 GMT

Dear Cristi,

I must say I’m baffled that you can be so daring and so level-headed at the same time. Also, your writing style is serves you very well. For example, “Zoom-dependent reality… On the same canvas there are multiple paintings, each of them visible at different scales." Altogether this is excellent work, though you deal with so many interesting topics that I sometimes...

I must say I’m baffled that you can be so daring and so level-headed at the same time. Also, your writing style is serves you very well. For example, “Zoom-dependent reality… On the same canvas there are multiple paintings, each of them visible at different scales." Altogether this is excellent work, though you deal with so many interesting topics that I sometimes found it hard to follow the through-line.

I’ll respond only to a couple of points. First, I don’t like this MUH business, and I don’t think the objections you mention get to the heart of the issue. I have no problem with the logical sense of “exists,” but it’s clearly distinct from the physical sense. Any mathematical structure, and in particular any useful equation in physics, can represent an infinite number of particular cases, only some of which are physically instantiated in any particular part of spacetime. Even if we assume the universe is infinite and contains all possible cases somewhere, a mathematical structure can be “isomorphic” to it only in a very partial and limited sense, that abstracts from every local viewpoint.

So your quotation from Hawking seems to me on target. The whole value of mathematics is that it abstracts from particular cases to articulate general principles. Yet isn’t the existence of distinct instances at particular times and places a basic feature of the physical world? What do our equations refer to, if not to the dynamic relationships between these instances?

Well, in quantum mechanics the equations don’t refer to determinate cases, only to the structure of probabilities. But this only strengthens my point – the equations don’t give us a world we can actually observe. The statistical patterns are very important, but also importantly different from the measured values that appear on each occasion.

It’s true that our physical universe doesn’t “exist with necessity.” Neither do you and I, of course; in fact 100 years ago it was incalculably unlikely that we would ever come to exist. Nonetheless, we have the history we have, going back to what looks like the Beginning. And the example of evolutionary biology shows beyond a doubt that there are ways of making sense of this history, in great depth, that don’t need to invoke mathematical necessity.

In my current essay I’ve tried to show how quantum measurement can be treated as a form of natural selection, different from but analogous to the way selection operates in biological reproduction and human communication. This develops the thought you mention in passing, that if “the universe has a purpose, then the purpose seems to be that of behaving according to its own physical laws.”

Of course quantum dynamics is not strictly “purposeful” any more than biological evolution is. But it’s an interesting question how the universe comes to be able to “obey” laws that are only computable in the simplest cases, or how it “knows how to build atoms,” etc. I try to show that these questions can in principle be addressed in physics, just as they can be in biology. That means that consistency is not our “only hope to understand the laws and the metalaws.” I hope you’ll eventually find time to give me feedback on this argument, which also happens to address the difficulty of defining subjective consciousness.

As to that, I agree with you that “whenever we try to define it, we do it in objective terms, which makes it trivial and irrelevant.” Quite so – the “hard problem” exists only because we want to treat consciousness as an objectively existing property of certain complex systems, whereas quite evidently it’s something that only exists subjectively, from one’s own point of view. Unfortunately, our intellectual tradition doesn’t do very well with integrating viewpoints into the physical world, though you’d think QM and relativity would have pushed us to do better.

My sense is that we conflate “having a particular point of view on the world” – which is something we can reasonably ascribe to atoms, or anything else that’s localized in space and time – with the kind of reflective self-awareness we humans have. The point I make in my essay is that the latter is essentially a communicative relationship with ourselves, that we evolve early on in life as we learn to communicate with others. Again, natural selection is at work here, though operating in ways quite different from Darwinian biology. If we’re talking about the “consciousness” of bees or horses, biology gives us everything we need, but the same is not true of us humans. Our brains are essentially the same biological hardware that our primate ancestors used, but the software we run on our brains is unique, and evolves differently.

Sorry for the length of these comments – though it’s your fault, for handling so many basic questions in such interesting ways.

> Any mathematical structure, and in particular any useful equation in physics, can represent an infinite number of particular cases, only some of which are physically instantiated in any particular part of spacetime. Even if we assume the universe is infinite and contains all possible cases somewhere, a mathematical structure can be “isomorphic” to it only in a very partial and limited sense, that abstracts from every local viewpoint. [...] Yet isn’t the existence of distinct instances at particular times and places a basic feature of the physical world? What do our equations refer to, if not to the dynamic relationships between these instances?

The statement "the universe is isomorphic to a mathematical structure" doesn't mean that it is to all solutions of an equation. Each initial condition gives a different solution, and maybe only one of them is a universe (ours), or maybe each of them is a different universe.

> In my current essay I’ve tried to show how quantum measurement can be treated as a form of natural selection ...

> My sense is that we conflate “having a particular point of view on the world” – which is something we can reasonably ascribe to atoms, or anything else that’s localized in space and time – with the kind of reflective self-awareness we humans have.

Indeed, I think this conflation is common but unsupported yet.

Best regards,

Cristi

adel sadeq wrote on Mar. 29, 2017 @ 21:05 GMT

Hi Cristinel,

Thank you for your comment on my thread. The gravity in my system seems to have a flavor of Verlinde's via a paper by Joakim Munkhammar which I think it is an interesting read in itself

Thank you very much for your lucid and fulfilling essay. There are many perspectives you describe that have helped me enjoy a different viewpoint on sometimes established subjects, such as for example your section on thermodynamics. So to keep it brief, I have two comments to share with you - not too sure how useful they may turn out to be. Firstly your diagram representing "Multiple levels of a dynamical system." reminds me of the topology of Voronoi Tessellation. This is interestingly brought up in a book by A. P. Fairall on the large scale structure of the universe. It just strikes me as curious that what you describe and what we see on the largest scales, may share some conceptual architectures. Which brings me to my second comment, and that is I enjoyed how you tie everything in to "tablet of the metalaw", which is in its entirety accommodated by the universe as we know it.

Thank you again for a great read, and I have in the meantime also rated your essay.

Thank you for your comments. Yes, I think the coarse grain partition looks similar to a Voronoi diagram. Indeed, the interior sets of any Voronoi tessellation define a relation of equivalence, and I think that for any relation of equivalence one can define a distance and select some representatives which make it into a Voronoi diagram. Interesting connection.

Best regards,

Cristi

George Kirakosyan wrote on Mar. 31, 2017 @ 03:31 GMT

Dear Cristinel

You have presented your next attractive essay. I no need tell you that it is amazing - provocative as per many people already saying this in their comments. On this I can tell only that your work deserves to highest rate that I'm going to do right now.

Let me just tell you one point only; you dare to put clearly formulated natural questions "What is the world made of?" for example. Meantime many high-advanced scientists just look on such questions as "immodest" and just inappropriate for "serious" scientists! I see this as a big tragedy in the natural science and I think now that you can be with me. I will simply ask you to open my work and go to end (to look on Refs too) because I am very hopeful you can find there some useful things.

> "you dare to put clearly formulated natural questions "What is the world made of?" for example. Meantime many high-advanced scientists just look on such questions as "immodest" and just inappropriate for "serious" scientists!"

You are right. In fact, I also try to avoid such questions in physics papers. But I like the FQXi platform because encourages such questions, and this is the right place for me to discuss them. If I would be able to suggest a clearly scientific answer to such questions, no doubt I would discuss them in scientific papers too. Thank you for pointing me to your essay, and I wish you success!

Best regards,

Cristi

George Kirakosyan replied on Apr. 5, 2017 @ 05:53 GMT

Dear Cristi (on your post in my page)

Many thanks for your attention and kindly words.

You are right - I have some alternative approach and own explanations to many of basic problems hoping somebody can show interest to this.

2) If sentience is irreducible then it must (still) be associated with structure and matter.

3) The question “why is there something rather than nothing?" can be answered by:

Because there are structures that can't not exist.” {mathematical structures}

4) (Hawking, 1988) Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

5) Additionally, one may feel that physics and mathematics are not enough to build consciousness. But almost all features of consciousness are conceivably reducible to information processing of one sort or another. If something resists, this is subjective experience.

In the absence of an absolute ground to rely on, I think what we really know is that we are, and that there are mathematical truths.

6) The tablet of the metalaw includes emergence, metatheorems, the relative interdependence and independence of various levels of reality. It takes into account both the bottom-up and the top-down constraints. It may even include a subjective science of the subjective experience.

All that is missing is a philosophical structure tying your ideas together. I would be interested in your reaction to my proposed structure…Binary Reflective Field Theory. It is suggested in my essay, Our Emergent Universe. Again, thank you for your essay, Graham

This was an enjoyable, thought-provoking article, just as the few others of yours I have read over the years have been. (Do you remember me from the collection of essays on time?)

I was glad that I could find at least a few points to disagree with which prompted this response. Please take these remarks for whatever you might extract from them.

|7> What is the sound of one universe rhyming? Discontinuity lurks within every koan.

|8> Emergent goals:

If I may offer my own phenomenal definitions: a sentient being is an individuated organism which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment in interaction with an external environment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject. It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized observation of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism’s acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise? Somehow, it must be connected to existential threat. But how does the organism come to sense that existential threat? My simplistic answer is that an organism's nerve endings, no matter how primitive, provide the initial feedback. All sentient beings have skin in the game. But there still remains the problem of how that feedback might be converted into sentience and the sensation of jeopardy. {Insert hand waving here} Once the sense of jeopardy has been detected, the obvious back reaction would be a teleological bias to fulfill the dual agendas: stay in the energy flux and avoid destruction. This would go for the tubeworms living near a steam vent or, as more neural circuitry is thrown at the problem in service of this agenda, an investment banker competing for her share of the billions in bonuses available to maintain herself far from equilibrium.

|10> I take the a priori existence of mathematical structures as the most comfortable and fruitful metaphysical position to jump to. But I guess that abstract existence of math is fundamentally different than its in-rebus implementation. My wild guess is that the ongoing collapse of the wavefunction turns potential existence into physical existence.

Existence, sentience, consciousness and the nature and mechanism behind the collapse of the wavefunction remain elusive mysterious. But are they intractable? The in-rebus causal lattice calculator is now busily humming away at that halting problem. Of course we have a para-logical tendency to personify this process (a short circuit to a simplistic answer at which point all further inquiry stops) and give it goals. But this bestows an enormous amount of baggage onto a mathematical structure, no matter how complex. Certainly, any goals or agendas must be present as potential eigenstates in the math for them to be able emerge in physical form.

Also, I think comparing the abstract with the imaginary is a category error. Imaginary is dependent upon an imaginer; the abstract is not.

Notes on the notes:

17. Here I find an excellent openness to new descriptions of reality.

18. When I see the word pure, which points to an abstract attribute, I want to see the conjugate attribute against which it can be discerned. Then I see that in order for any attribute to be manifested by the universe, then both it and its conjugate must be present.

Thank you so much for providing me with so much thought-provoking material for these cogitations.

Thank you for your comments, I will not comment them, except to say that they are brilliant. You said "I was glad that I could find at least a few points to disagree with which prompted this response.", but I don't disagree with most of your comments, perhaps maybe that my definition of sentient is different from the one you used, hence the conclusions.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich wrote on Apr. 2, 2017 @ 08:09 GMT

Dear Cristinel Stoica

If you believed in the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, then your essay would be even better. There is not movable a geometric space, and is movable physical space. These are different concepts.

I inform all the participants that use the online translator, therefore, my essay is written badly. I participate in the contest to familiarize English-speaking scientists with New Cartesian Physic, the basis of which the principle of identity of space and matter. Combining space and matter into a single essence, the New Cartesian Physic is able to integrate modern physics into a single theory. Let FQXi will be the starting point of this Association.

Don't let the New Cartesian Physic disappear! Do not ask for himself, but for Descartes.

New Cartesian Physic has great potential in understanding the world. To show potential in this essay I risked give "The way of the materialist explanation of the paranormal and the supernatural" - Is the name of my essay.

Visit my essay and you will find something in it about New Cartesian Physic. After you give a post in my topic, I shall do the same in your theme

> "If you believed in the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, then your essay would be even better. There is not movable a geometric space, and is movable physical space. These are different concepts"

I don't think space(-time) and matter are independent, actually I think they are faces of the same thing. My guess is that a geometric structure, and geometry seems so far to be the best description of relativity and particles.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich replied on Apr. 5, 2017 @ 07:04 GMT

Dear Cristinel Stoica,

My rating dropped. If you did not take part in it, you can raise the prestige of the New Cartesian Physic and continue our communication.

In philosophy I was looking for an answer to the question: "What is the matter?" The answer I not found. Instead, there was the assertion that matter exists in time and space that exist separately from it. This statement I criticized. Matter does not exist, and creates time and space. Identity of space and matter lay in the basis of the New Cartesian Physic, which explained the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of which force on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck''s constant to the speed of light.

This and other achievements make me turn to you to help me to develop it further

I have a list of essays which I read, and yours I didn't read yet, hence didn't rate it yet. When and if I will do it, it will be according to my own evaluation, and not in order to raise or lower your ratings. About your statement you criticized, I don't think I said this about physics. It may be true about some theories, which are only approximations. Trust me, I know what I think and what I don't think about physics :) Good luck!

Best regards,

Cristi

Janko Kokosar wrote on Apr. 2, 2017 @ 11:28 GMT

Dear Cristi

There are nicely presented problems on the way to physically explain consciousness. It seems that you are not sure, what is the answer. For instance Dawkins is almost sure, what the answers are. :)

As a detail:

You wrote about down-top causation, how details of quantum physics are un-important in classical physics. But if we assume that quantum consciousness exists this is something from quantum level, what remain in classical level. There are still some physical experiments, like interference, which show quantum physics on macro level.

But in my old essay I wrote one sentence and now you and Ellis write a similar sentence:

Kokosar: Let us assume that there is a woman Desiree who is never awake and only dreams. As a consequence, her ego would be weaker. Thus, this is one hint that differentiation and integration are important only because of memorizing of qualia.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1832

Stoica: If one would dream his entire life, and the dream would be consistent, then wouldn’t that person experience imaginary as real?

Thanks for the comments, and for the links between our essays, the differences and the parallels, in particular about the role of consciousness in quantum, and the difference between the dream state and the awake state. Good luck in the contest!

4." They are a priori truths " ( it is correct, because they are synthetic a priori judgments ).

Hence, my transcendental Kantian answer for your conjecture :

Suppose we will find the Unified theory of the fundamental physical laws. Then what? My answer - we will find neo - Kantian transcendental physics as a realization of Kant's dream of so called " Pure Metaphysics ".

Interesting the connections with Kant's synthetic a priori judgments based on necessity. I like in principle your answer 'Suppose we will find the Unified theory of the fundamental physical laws. Then what? My answer - we will find neo - Kantian transcendental physics as a realization of Kant's dream of so called " Pure Metaphysics ".'

Best wishes,

Cristi

Jeffrey Michael Schmitz wrote on Apr. 4, 2017 @ 04:07 GMT

Dear Cristi,

The structure of this essay is wonderful with brackets from quantum mechanics used for section numbers. The essay is clearly written with a sense of style. You artfully fold in the major bullet points of the contest and end with musings about the nature and existence of the universe.

I have seen a few of these essays with the idea of a multi-level system with one level being the microstates needed for the next level up. The largest jump in levels is between the quantum level and the thermodynamic level. If we think of entropy being the “arrow in time” than we need to be in the thermodynamic realm to experience the evolution of time (with time being undefined at the quantum level). We cannot see entropy in the ground state of a single atom. Bacteria exist near the border of the thermodynamic realm and more importantly they exist because they are near that border.

Intelligence is a simple, common, but important process that is misunderstood. Intelligence is not a better or more rapid calculation, but a different type of process with advantages and disadvantages.

Thank you for the very interesting comments. Indeed, I agree with "The largest jump in levels is between the quantum level and the thermodynamic level. If we think of entropy being the “arrow in time” than we need to be in the thermodynamic realm to experience the evolution of time (with time being undefined at the quantum level). We cannot see entropy in the ground state of a single atom. Bacteria exist near the border of the thermodynamic realm and more importantly they exist because they are near that border.". Also, I agree with you about intelligence as not being "a better or more rapid calculation, but a different type of process with advantages and disadvantages."

Best regards,

Cristi

Jeffrey Michael Schmitz replied on Apr. 5, 2017 @ 16:20 GMT

Cristi,

I would like you to read my essay and give an honest review. My essay is a quick read, but it is doing poorly in the ranking and it would be helpful for me to understand why.

At the risk of mixing icons, I have an image of you walking up to the top of the pyramid, being struck by lightning, and then walking down the pyramid looking like Moses with a beard and carrying a tablet:-)

BTW, the use of bra-ket notation for subheading markers was a nice touch.

In |7> you mention placing constraints upon the system. This is a theme that appears in several of the essays with the same basic

I also see quite a bit of thematic similarity with your previous essay.

Thank you for the kind comments. I shaved recently, I hope someday to visit the pyramids, and I will not carry coins to avoid lightning :) And I sometimes carry with me a tablet on which I have papers to read about the law and the metalaw, but nothing complete yet :) Thanks again, and good luck with your essay!

Cristi

Thomas Howard Ray wrote on Apr. 6, 2017 @ 19:14 GMT

Cristi,

You are always thoughtful, provocative and fun to read.

I'm coming back to this later, leaving you now with my highest mark. I haven't been very engaged with this round of essays, but I always look forward to yours.

Good to see you again and thank you for the feedback, and for mentioning your essay to me.

Best regards,

Cristi

Torsten Asselmeyer-Maluga wrote on Apr. 6, 2017 @ 19:41 GMT

Dear Cristi,

now as promised, some reamrks to your essay (including an upvoting with highest mark).

There is a lo to agree with (reminds on a letter of Pauli to Heisenberg: always boring agreement).

But there is at least one point of disagree: the indeterminism for large systems in statistical physics is not a kind of coarse graining in state space. Even my essay showed that for large system or strong interaction some qualitative change happens. In the case of brain networks you will get a transition from a graph to a tree (having a direction).

I suppose it also for other systems (and you don't need infinite limits...)

Thank you for coming back and for your kind comments. Good to see that we have agreements but also apparently a disagreement :).

You said "the indeterminism for large systems in statistical physics is not a kind of coarse graining in state space.". Here is how I see it: I think what matters for coarse graining are the states. Two dynamical systems may live in the same state space, yet one of them be deterministic and the other indeterministic, so the coarse graining can be the same. They will evolve differently, of course. But any configuration can be reached by a deterministic evolution of one system or an indeterministic one of the second system. So I am not sure how something can emerge only in one and not the other, since it will still be one of the possible states. We can even approximate one with the other, considering nonlinear unstable deterministic evolution which depends on small state differences within the same region of the coarse graining, so the two will be indistinguishable from the higher level where only the coarse graining is perceived and not the low level details. As an example, the deterministic classical mechanics has a coarse graining which allows us to describe thermodynamics. When we realized it is quantum and this seems indeterministic, nothing was lost or gained in our understanding of thermodynamics as arising from classical statistical mechanics. Moreover, the same quantum mechanics admits both indeterministic and deterministic low-level descriptions/interpretations, and most representants of both sides agree that we can't distinguish them.

Best wishes and success in the contest,

Cristi

Peter Jackson wrote on Apr. 6, 2017 @ 20:19 GMT

Hi Christi,

I've just read your excellent review and analysis a 2nd time. I'd hoped you'd have read my essay before commenting to help understanding. But time is now short.

First I do like your pyramid architecture. I also invoke a layered structure, universally, as the quantum modal logic I discussed last year and also in the cortex deriving aims as higher level decisions served by feedback loops and a consequential cascade of lower level ones. Though that does need far more memory 'channel' capacity than we seem to have decoded.

However I'd like to discuss more your; "During a quantum measurement, if the observed quantum system is in a superposition of states distinguishable by the apparatus, Schrodinger's equation predicts a superposition of states of the apparatus, one for each of the possible states of the observed system. Because we never see such superpositions, physicists postulated that during the measurement a wavefunction collapse occurs. The wavefunction collapse has some serious problems, in particular it leads to violations of the conservation laws "

...which I find a very good analysis, a classical solution to which is what I build up to, so I do hope you'll look as critically as possible and comment as it seems as geometrically self apparent as your pyramid. May new discoveries in this area lead to a metalaw?

If you haven't read mine yet and wish to; don't try to speed-read it! All the value is in the dense fine structure and in building the ontology. Many thanks and very well done for yours yet again, so here we are close neighbours again!

Thank you for the comments. We both agree that we still have to learn from what the quantum world is trying to tell us, maybe, as you said, new metalaws. I wish you good luck in the contest!

Best regards,

Cristi

Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich wrote on Apr. 7, 2017 @ 08:26 GMT

Dear Sirs!

Physics of Descartes, which existed prior to the physics of Newton returned as the New Cartesian Physic and promises to be a theory of everything. To tell you this good news I use «spam».

New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. It showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

New Cartesian Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return. Can put me 1.

There are several points of interest I'll want to return to when there is time, after the rush to read and rate the remaining essays. But I found myself several times wanting to point out analogies with the Mandelbrot Set, or even how it is a good candidate for the meta-law you seek. My GR21 presentation and Gravity Research Foundation essay both focus on what the Mandelbrot Set can tell us about Gravity. M mimics DGP gravity in a unique way, where (-0.75, 0i) is the 5-d black hole --> white hole in 4-d spacetime suggested by Pourhasan, Afshordi, and Mann.

Still a work in progress and more to tell, but the Mandelbrot Set and its formula would fit nicely on a T-Shirt! I think you'd enjoy my essay, if you have time. Your essay is a gem and deserves to be in the finals. I'll return and talk further about what I like when I can.

One feature in the Mandelbrot Set which sets it apart is maximal asymmetry. It maps one to one with the logistic map, such that each bifurcation is a place where the boundary folds back on itself. But it contains many exact symmetries, at the branching Misiurewicz points. However; the figure and the bounding space of each symmetric structure is asymmetrical. So what we see is perfect local symmetries against a background of global asymmetry. I think this notion has much value to Physics.

Jonathan, thank you for your comments and the connections you make with the Mandelbrot set. In particular the connections with gravity, which you maybe already know that is used in some fractal spacetime approaches that aim to get a reduction of dimension as going to short length scales in order to make quantum gravity renormalizable (see e.g. Calcagni's work). (actually I've got the same dimensional reduction in the context of my approach to singularities, which perhaps suggests a fractality of the metric but not of the topology.) Of course, the relation with the Mandelbrot set and other fractal or self-similar object extends more than this.

Best regards,

Cristi

Jonathan J. Dickau replied on Apr. 8, 2017 @ 17:16 GMT

Thanks greatly Cristi!

I was blithely unaware of Calcagni, but not anymore. Your linked paper looks like an intriguing approach to dimensional reduction. I'm glad I checked back! That's the great thing about this forum, where connections will pop out for somebody else, that even an esteemed author might never suspect exist. I guess I should compare notes further, after some time to digest.